Losing nearly twenty-three thousand dollars on every car you deliver isn’t exactly a successful business model. Ford’s electric division, Model e, just wrapped up the first quarter of 2026 with a loss of $777 million. This is actually being framed as “progress” because it’s $72 million less than they bled during the same period last year. It’s like celebrating because you only set fire to a wing of your mansion instead of the whole estate.
With a revenue of $1.2 billion and a burn rate that would make a rock star blush, Ford is learning the hard way that the electric dream currently has a very expensive price tag.
The American EV market has turned into a cold, lonely place. The removal of the $7,500 federal tax credit was the equivalent of taking away the training wheels from a toddler who hasn’t learned to balance yet. Suddenly, the average buyer realized they didn’t actually want an electric truck that much.
Ford’s reaction was as blunt as a sledgehammer. By late 2025, they quietly pulled the plug on the F-150 Lightning production. The supposed “savior” of the American work fleet is now on an indefinite coffee break, a victim of a market that simply stopped caring about virtuous towing capacity.
Thankfully for Detroit, the “dinosaur” technology is still paying the bills. Ford as a whole is doing just fine, thank you very much, raking in $43.3 billion in revenue and $2.5 billion in net profit this quarter. The internal combustion engine remains the undisputed sugar daddy of the operation, moving nearly 900,000 gas-guzzlers compared to a meager 34,000 EVs.
Jim Farley isn’t waving the white flag just yet, though. The strategy is shifting from PowerPoint fantasies to the Universal EV” platform. They are also pivoting toward Ford Energy, hoping that if they can’t sell you the car, they can at least sell you the box to store the power. It is a sobering realization: in the EV world, it’s not enough to just show up to the party.
